That's a lie. The first report of them was in the 2007-01-21 test:
This is MediaWiki version 1.10alpha (r19546).
<snip> > > 2 new FAILING test(s) :( > * URL-encoding in URL functions (single parameter) > * URL-encoding in URL functions (multiple parameters)
So, what happened?
They never passed the test, but were failing since someone added them. So... no, it's correct, isn't it?
-chris